I'm in the middle of a massive cold, coming at the end of a very busy week, which is why the latest ASR's been behind a bit.

There's only two or three strips left in this storyline (I don't know for sure since I'm doing a last minute rewrite) and then, after a quick hiatus, we'll get ASR storyline #2, "Love Letter", a short sequence guest-drawn by http://cmooki.keenspace.com's Teague Tysseling. At that point, I *promise* it'll start to be regularly updated, rather than the scattershot updates I've been struggling through. This is because I had no backlog. But with another artist taking over for a while, and a bit of a break, I'll be raring to go with storyline #3 (working title: "Flouting Convention"). This'll be really cool.

After that we'll get to what you've all been waiting for, the exciting Origin of the Amazons!

Once "Love Letter" starts, ASR will be regularly updated three times a week, on the same days every time. I swear.

Here's the latest inside scoop on the Amazons. You won't see this on E! Tonight, oh no! Mostly because they don't care. But I like to jabber on about my upcoming plans, so:

"Love Letter" is twelve strips long...and let's have another hand for Teague for doing that. He's great. I'll be paying him back in slave labour for decades to come. Incidentally, if anyone else is interested in drawing an ASR storyline of approximately equal length, I'd love to hear from you!

Next is "Flouting Convention". It'll focus on Lt. Missy, introduce a new character, and have more cameos than Mike's Fantastical Bestiary Retro-80s Cameo Fiesta (in which STILL none of my characters have appeared, I'll get you for this, Rosen-Molina!!!!)

Then it's "The Girls of the Milky Way", which is the ASR "pilot episode"...I don't know how long it'll be, but it'll be pretty darn big (possibly as long as "Unearthly Delights"). And it'll answer whatever lingering questions you all might have about how these modern-day Earth chicks (and one Earth dude) got the gig of saving the universe on a regular basis, and how they do it.

After that I have a weird, and rather dark, little plotline centering on Roz (because she was feeling left out) which will introduce, yep, another new character. It's tentatively called "Flesh & Blood".

Then a plot that I've been hankering to do for a while now, that should be a lot of fun. I think I might call it "Into the Woods", unless that'll have the estate of Stephen Sondheim suing me. (Unless he's still alive...I don't know.) It's the ASR equiavlent of one of Star Trek's "holodeck" episodes.

Then the storyline whose title I swiped from the defunct Lancelot, "Beneath the Rose", which is sort of like the marker for a whole new season of ASR (I should have been doing the strip for at least a year by this point.) This story will pay off a lot of gathering plot threads and really take the whole strip barelling off in a new, and pretty intense, direction. This is the "Empire Strikes Back" of ASR (or at least, it sets the stage for it) and will begin a new year or so in which the focus of the strip shifts radically. But don't worry, I won't forget the Amazons' roots.